Prepublication of the introductory article of an issue of _Cercles, revue pluridisciplinaire d'études anglophones_. The biographical turn, as we find convenient to call the renewed interest in biography and biographic approaches that has been taking place over the last decades, converging from several disciplines of the humanities, appears like a paradigmatic debate of sorts, that both calls for a new definition of biography in the larger sense of the term, and generates a theoretical demand.This article positions biographical studies within the perimeter of life-writing considered as an emerging crossroads discipline in the humanities. It analyses some of the causes of the so-called "resistance to theory" of biography. It argues that the very reappraisal of the central concept of the subject operated by the philosophy of deconstruction and analytic philosophy has entailed the emergence of life-writing, and created the intellectual need to theorize biography in this larger sense.